The Kids are All Right!
That's the message Newsweak wants to send with this
silly little story.
So when exit polls suggested many of America’s youth had stayed home once again this year, the media wasn’t surprised. The Associated Press wrote them off by early evening on Election Day, saying the turnout wasn’t the groundswell that had been expected. Final exit polls showed that 18-29-year-olds made up only 17 percent of all voters—similar to 2000’s turnout. "Yeah, we rocked the vote all right,” gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson griped to the Aspen (Colo.) Daily News on election night. “Those little bastards betrayed us again." And as a final insult, the Drudge Report posted this snarky headline: VOTE OR DIE OR WHATEVER.
But it turns out that the youth vote did materialize, at least according to one study.
According to a new analysis of voter data, turnout among the under-30 set shot up 9 percent from 2000. The study, conducted by the University of Maryland’s Center for Information & Research on Civil Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE), found that at least 20.9 million in the 18-29-year-old bracket voted, compared with only about 16 million in 2000. The exit polls didn’t register the increase because they show the percentage of young voters out of all voters. Since every age bracket voted in higher numbers than in 2000, the exit polls showed about equal youth shares of total voters for 2004 and 2000—not an accurate picture of the youth vote, experts say. "The main information available to any of us at this point is the set of exit polls," says Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. "CIRCLE's analysis is the best careful look at this ... It's like the Bible to me now."
I tend to doubt this myself. First of all, the numbers don't make sense. They say that the percentage of 18-29-year-olds voting (as compared to other age brackets) did not increase because the other age brackets increased as well. But if their numbers went from 16 to 20.9 million, that's a 31% increase. But nationally the increase in overall voting was only about 10%. And 16 million is not 17% of the total vote of 105,000,000 in 2000; it's more like 15.2%, and 20.9 million is just over 18% of the total turnout in 2004.
